Moving schools during grad school!

Sometimes it feels like life hands you the short end of the stick. You spent hours and hours finding a university with a program you like. You’ve been here for a while, made friends, fostered a community, and then you get news that your advisor is moving. Now what?

This is the situation I found myself in after my first semester at Emory. While some could argue that I’d only been there for 4 months before hearing this news, that was almost 3000 grueling hours I spent with my cohort getting adjusted to graduate school, teaching, lab rotations, taking my own classes, learning a new city, and choosing an advisor. You really get to know people when you’re basically all flailing around trying to deal with the monster that is graduate school. I had a year to prepare for moving and in hindsight I would have done it completely differently.

We moved the summer after my second year. In that time, I had developed a strong sense of community within the department, but the reality is my friends were few and far between. While I had people in my corner, the loneliness was unbearable, and I was probably in the worst depressive slump of my life. At the time my logic was, I’m going to move in a year, there’s no point in making good friends when I’ll just have to say bye in a few months. I never let myself get close to anyone because I was still dealing with moving apart from my undergrad friends and didn’t want to go through that again so soon.

The start of my third year was, to put it gently, strange. I was still in the chemistry department, but my advisor and our lab were housed in the biochemistry department. Even though these two departments were a few minutes’ walk away. Dealing with setting up and organizing a new lab while also unpacking your own house and figuring out how to restart research made it feel like the chemistry department was oceans away. Plus, whom would I even go talk to? It’s not like I really knew anyone. And it was summer so there weren’t really any events happening that I could go to and meet other students. This is a big thing I wish could be changed, I wish I had asked someone in the department either the chair or the DEI head to organize something for us. So, we could have a glimpse of what it feels like to belong to this department. Instead, I chose to just live with the loneliness and isolation.

I tried making my lab mates my friends, which is all good and fun until you realize you’re talking to the same people for multiple hours 5 to 6 days a week. I craved variety but I didn’t know how to get it. Moving to a college town meant there wasn’t really much going on other than drinking and I wanted to get to know people on a more personal level, not through a drunken half remembered conversation. This is when I started therapy to try to learn how to cope with the isolation that was eating me from the inside out. Therapy helped and so did getting involved in other organizations, I joined the graduate and professional student association where I was getting to meet amazing people all across campus. But then COVID hit! Yay! (Note the sarcasm).

Being present on social media during COVID was an interesting experience. Of course, I had my own trauma and anxiety to deal with but seeing all these students talk about how COVID is affecting their research was a foreign experience to me. I had been through a disruption not even 6 months earlier and at least all of these people had friends they could lean on. I was in a new city and all my friends disappeared because we weren’t close enough to bubble together. I will admit here, I was also extremely lucky because I had data that I could start writing up into a paper. While my peers were struggling with figuring out what to do when they can’t go into lab, I had a plan.

Don’t mistake me saying I have a plan as confidence. I was scared and nervous and anxious. Every day that first year of the pandemic was a new day to be a ball of nerves. I was scared to be outside and to be in contact with people and developed a small amount of agoraphobia. This was affecting my academic work. I had so many days where it was hard to focus on the work at hand and what made it worse was that I didn’t really have other graduate students to talk to for support. Eventually I banded my Emory community together for weekly virtual boardgames, but all was silent on the Penn State front.

Now two years later, with plenty of experience and hindsight, under my belt, I really wish I had done things different.  From the get-go I was setting myself up for failure. Thinking that making short term friends isn’t worthwhile was shooting myself in the foot.  I’ve learned now that it isn’t the duration of the friendship but the quality. We live in a world that is ultra-connected, meaning the people worth talking to, are within arm’s reach. Yeah, sometimes it’s scary to reach out but it’s worth it when you get a lovely conversation out of the effort.

I should have advocated for myself. Instead of letting myself get shuffled through the department, I should have been blunt with someone whether it was the graduate association, the graduate coordinator, or some faculty member, that I was not thriving. That I felt like an outcast and I had no clue who to talk to if I wanted to bounce science ideas off someone. I’m not going to wallow in regret, because things did eventually work out for me. But it would have made life a heck of a lot easier if I wasn’t reinventing the wheel every time I ran into some experimental issue.  

On a more program requirement front, making the switch wasn’t that bad. We talked to the new department well in advance of the move and asked general questions regarding what credits would transfer, what program requirements would we need to complete, what requirements can be transferred, how does healthcare work, what about stipends, all those fun questions. Getting answers was slow and at times frustrating. I also had to consider whether I really wanted to make that switch or stay at Emory. Or did I want to move but get a degree from Emory? In the end I chose to make the move and get my degree from Penn State. But that was also because at that time zoom wasn’t a thing so the idea of flying once a year just to meet with my committee seemed like such a hassle. That said, I would make the decision I made again because while I’ve felt like an outsider within Penn State, I’ve also learned so much that I wouldn’t have been able to back at Emory.

How it worked out for me was that I needed to retake one class (any 3-credit class would suffice) and I needed to redo my comprehensives, so I was no longer a PhD candidate but back to being a PhD student for a short time. This wasn’t too much for me, I mean was I happy about it at the time? No. But it could have been a lot more work and had that been the case I don’t think I’d have been so willing to move.

This is my story with moving institutions during my PhD and some of the times that I’ve had to deal with. Your pages are still blank so fill them with things that make you happy. Go out there and make friends, learn cool science, and advocate for yourself. It’s hard, like extremely hard, but you can do it. You might not be where you pictured yourself when applying to graduate schools, but you’re also not as alone as you think you are. Other graduate students may not be able to relate to this specific experience, but they also have day to day experiences that are like yours. Yeah, it’s convenient having a cohort to lean on, but now you have a golden opportunity. You can build your own cohort and make your own rules. Who cares if your friends are first years or if they’re fifth years with one leg out the door? As long as they are there for you that’s all that matters.